A Clear Lack of Tact
by OnTheImportanceOfLungs
Summary: What the Enigma was to the Eight Generals, Doug was to the armies he had commanded over the years. But no one's ever heard his story quite like it when it comes from his own mouth. A retelling set on the continent of Elibe.
1. Prologue Part 1

Rebooting Tactician because playing Fire Emblem again and again is no good for my health, but probably better than the other activities I could be engaging in during spring break. Like drinking myself stupid.

But if Hemingway can be believed, I can do both. Or something to that extent.

**Story Start**

King Fado didn't seem to be a rich man to me, though I doubt any castle on this island could compare to the grand palace of Bern or the snowy halls of Edessa. But compared even to the strongholds in the Lycian city-states, Castle Renais still seems relatively tiny.

Despite the modesty around me, there was an air of knighthood around here, the type of air that I breathed in the tents and camps of the two armies I'd fought along side. A tactician yearns for this environment, because it means that his knights would not only grow, but grow together.

In Castle Renais, the dining hall doubled as the throne room, and King Fado was seated on the round table with his men. I was introduced to them. To his left sat a young man with sharp eyes named Orson, his lady wife on his other side. The King's children, no more than ten years of age, were seated to his right. Ephraim spoke his name like a knight under his father's service, his tone low and respectful with a hint of steel. Eirika met my eye boldly and her words were almost a declaration of battle. Both earned my smile.

"So you are a bard, you say?" King Fado finally directed to me, indicating that he had finished dining. I stopped picking at my food and nodded at him.

"Yes, my King."

"Well, then, tell a story!" Eirika interjected, enthusiastic as children are.

I nodded at her solemnly and brought out the lyre in my pack. "I'm here today," I strummed and half-sang, half-said, "to tell the story of Prince Marth, from-"

"But I've heard that one already!" Eirika whined. The king looked secretly relieved as well.

"Do not mind my daughter, Sir Bard. You may sing us whatever you wish."

I looked to him, judging him. This was a good table. They'd undoubtedly heard the stories of Siegfried the Rebel. They'd probably even heard the story of the Eight Generals of the Scouring, from my homeland.

But I had a rather special tale indeed, that I had saved up for a good amount of years.

"Well, I'd hate to bore the princess, my king. I do have one story that I can be certain she has never heard. This is a difficult story indeed, a story of assassins and traitors, of knights and sages, of legends meeting their start and legends meeting their end…"

**Tactician**

I'm Doug. Doug Deeping. Laugh it out before I continue.

I'm the son of the Wyvern General Jeremy Deeping, who was once the Highmaster of the Wyvern Corps of Bern. I'm from a family of nobility to an extent. We owned very little land and a collection of small villages that we were indebted to some bankers in Etruria over. But then my father became general and the King paid it off in a pair of rubies.

My father learned the spear from his collection of pictures, of Paladin Barrigan. Perhaps that was why he was so successful in the Corps - he was capable of unseating his commander from the day he joined as a teenager.

I'm shit with a lance. It's too heavy for me, especially since the general earned twenty thousand gold pieces a year and I'm weak and lazy according to my father. I haven't used a coin of his since I was seven, to be honest with you.

While my father's hero was Knight Barrigan, my hero was Bramimond the Enigma. According to the writings of the Archsage, while Barrigan gave his horse, charred to the bone, to the cause, Bramimond gave something infinitely more important - her soul. When she smashed her Ring and used the remains to forge the tome Apocalypse, she lost all semblance of personality and became what she aspired to be - humanity's last hope. When the Archsage could cast no more spells and the Saint had run dry of prayers, the Enigma reversed the flow of nature and froze the breath of dragons in their throats.

Barrigan would go on to ride a pegasus and lead frozen Ilia to the beginnings of prosperity. Bramimond would go on to be sealed in a shrine for hundreds of years.

When I was sixteen, the same age as my father when he was recruited to ride wyverns, Bern had four pillars of its military might. The most well known might have been the people sitting on fun-sized dragons, but there was also a future for those who would rather play with swords or axes - a future of the ground, that is. Bern didn't have a cavalry to speak of, but the bulk of the army, a good half of it, consisted of men swinging axes they'd chopped down a tree with earlier in the morning and boys with their family sword. Usually the family sword had been mass produced in an earlier time.

There were two other, less illustrious, branches - the Mage's Guild and Intelligence. While I had liked the idea of flinging spells around, and an old childhood friend of mine was a ranking member of the Guild, Intelligence gave me an offer I couldn't resist in the form of a mentor.

He was the one and only Legault, twenty five years old, flagrantly homosexual and a genius with a curved blade that was called the Edge. You could find it in some stores for several thousand gold pieces, but the military didn't officially carry any. He'd been the Head of Intelligence for nearly four years to the date, slitting throats in foreign countries with the true efficiency of a blackheart.

Legault was damn good at what he did and I wasn't afraid to use my budding sexuality to convince him to teach me some of the more difficult tricks of the trade. My father was quite disgusted when I pranced out of the house in a coat with nothing underneath, tight pants and leather boots.

On the day my story begins, I was eighteen years old. My father was in the yard, his lance dancing to a melody that only he could hear. He wasn't the most muscular of the Wyvern Corps, but he was quicker than most of the thieves and other riffraff in Intelligence and as durable as his successor and protege, General Murdock, in his clunky armor.

"Are you going out dressed like _that_ to work?" He never failed to comment on it. When I was younger, watching him off the back of Blackie was the most terrifying experience ever. In truth, General Deeping's wyvern was probably the most terrifying wyvern to have ever been born. It had been named after its color, a deep coal, and it was at least sixty years older than the second eldest wyvern in Bern. Blackie had been the mount my father's grandfather rode into war with Etruria a hundred years ago.

"Yeah." My reply was curt, but it didn't deter him from chastising me about my life choices yet again.

"You're too good for intelligence. Being taught everything is an right and not a privilege in the Corps-"

I cut him off. "If there aren't good men in Intelligence, then the Bernese military machine would be blind."

"Indeed, Highmaster."

I turned to my most recent broken heart. Parva was blonde and beautiful and four years older than me. She had been my childhood friend for a while before her family moved to a different manse. Adding to the fact that we were only in the city during the winters anyway, it became really difficult to stay friends with her. Naturally, when I rose through the ranks in the military, we became lovers. Naturally, it ended in tears for both of us.

"Hello, Parva." My father smiled. He approved of her and they discussed magical theory once in a while. Naturally, he didn't know we had stopped seeing one another. He was also unaware of how far we had gone in our relationship.

"General Deeping," she returned, her grin somewhat forced. "I've come to collect Doug. There's been a bit of an incident down at Intel."

Intelligence was a good ways away - past the city center and the King's gardens. I had never been taught how to teleport despite my education in magic - it was too flashy for my business, after all. Parva gave me a smile that told me quite clearly that I was walking and she disappeared into the ether.

"Girl problems?" my father asked, relieved that he had some sort of common ground with me.

"Something like that," I grimaced.

"I think I'll fly down as well. Something tells me that having a ranking sage of the Guild as a messenger girl doesn't bode well."

I nodded, suddenly pensive. My father was rarely wrong when it came to catastrophe. He took off riding Blackie bareback, giving me a smile that told me quite clearly that I was walking.

As I stomped over to the gate I muttered expletives under my breath about both of them.

I checked my pockets as I walked further from the manse. I had maybe enough wound paste for a papercut and several hundred gold pieces on me. Hidden inside the folds of my coat was a tome that I had acquired in Lycia when I visited - Nosferatu the Vampire, the Second Magic of Bramimond. It allowed the practitioner to feed on the soul of their victim and heal the body, but I'm certain that it damages the mind. I also had a dented lockpick and my dirk.

The dirk is an interesting weapon. It seems to be a cross between a sword and a dagger, but the technique required to perform with it is like neither. It does make assassinations delightfully easy, as the point is just thin enough to fit comfortably between a helmet and a platebody and hit the nerve stem in the back of the neck.

It'd be nearly thirty minutes until I got to Intelligence.

I was not prepared for what I saw.


	2. Prologue Part 2

Hey guys I'm totally serious about this story. Really. Updating as soon as I can.

**Tactician**

The first thing I saw was Parva's little sister, Brunya. She was puking her guts out in the training field outside of Intelligence headquarters. I frowned. Brunya was only ten years old, and another rising star in the Guild. Her dyed-purple hair was covered in her body fluid but she was shaking and crying and didn't care.

"Brunya. Get ahold of yourself," I shouted.

She snapped to attention, tears shining in her eyes. "I... I wouldn't go in there if I were you, sir."

"What the hell happened, Mage?"

She shook her head emphatically and then threw up again.

So someone had been killed, probably mauled. This was a common reaction. The first time I'd seen someone run through with a lance, I had barely blinked. But the first time I saw a man charred alive by St. Elmo's Fire from Parva's hands, I had screamed - falling out of the tree I was watching from. The smell of cooked flesh never really does leave your nose, especially since the roast boar that the King insists on serving at banquets is so similar. I believe the man enjoyed watching his generals cringe.

I stepped past Brunya and the somewhat nondescript gate and immediately reevaluated my opinion.

It was a massacre.

Three steps from me, there was a man who had been cut open from his adam's apple to his sternum. There was no blood, but the man was clearly dead. I examined his armor, realizing that the weapon necessary to sear it in half must have been superheated with the magic of St. Elimine. The cut had been sealed shut by the very nature of the weapon.

I turned to another body, noting the missing head. It was a woman wearing a paisley cloak and- I paused.

"Oh, fuck me." I grunted. Someone had forcibly parted Ella from her head. She was good at what she did - not needing a lock pick to jimmy a door open. While she wasn't terrible at assassinations, she couldn't fight to save her life. The cut looked almost casual based on the horizontal slash.

I said a quick prayer to the Saint. She hadn't been a friend of mine, but we'd worked together once to off some minor Etrurian noble at some point. I'd pulled her out of the way of a vengeful Count Reglay's flame spell, which ended up burning down four acres of forest before he put it out himself.

If it had hit her, she might have exploded, much like the third body I examined. There was literally no way to identify it, as it had been killed with a bolt of lightning which completely charred everything into a black husk. Or so I thought, until I saw a telltale glint of gold in what had been a mouth.

"Shit." Why anyway would want to kill the kindhearted Regis was beyond my imagining. The man was never assigned on most missions because he refused to kill his enemies, but he was so good at sneaking around unnoticed and stealing things that barely anyone cared.

I gave up the bodily identification as a bad job. This was cutting me deeper as I continued through the mounds of people I had once known. I felt a wave of lightheadedness and nausea and was tempted to run outside to the field and join Brunya, but I pressed onwards into the main compound, a well built manse.

I immediately regretted it. While there were around twenty or thirty bodies lining the courtyard outside, in here, my friends and associates lined the walls.

"Fucking hell," I whispered as I walked over to where Parva was. Her face was set in stone and she was nursing a large burn on her bare forearm.

"What the hell happened here?" I choked out.

"Some intruder broke into the compound and Legault told me to go get you. But when I got back, everyone in the courtyard had been killed and Legault was standing back to back with the intruder. She nailed me in the arm with a bolt from afar, but my sage's cloak took most of it for me. If I hadn't had this talisman, I'd probably be hurting pretty bad right now. She pointed at the grayish red gem around her neck."

"So he was a traitor?"

"Yeah. This is going to be a scandal if it gets out. So I ran up to them and tried to freeze Legault with the Fimbulvtr," she said, a note of pride entering her voice despite the circumstances. The Fimbulvtr was extremely difficult to use - even I knew that. "But then I missed him and hit the intruder. Don't think she's ever going to swallow right ever again. After that, they jumped onto the intruder's wyvern and took off through the window, but your dad crossed them midair just as they went through. The Highmaster didn't have a weapon drawn, but he literally pulled a dry branch off that tree," she gestured, "just as Blackie checked the other wyvern in the face and put the branch through Legault's right shoulder."

She frowned. "They got away, but I don't think Legault's going to be using his sword arm anytime soon, even with a brilliant cleric to tend to him. The branch came out his back."

Speaking of the devil, my father flew over despite the ceilings being lower than Blackie's standing height. "No survivors, but there might have been people who escaped over a wall and hid," he said grimly. "I told you that man was trouble." If he weren't my father, I would believed that he was sneering at me maliciously. "I've reported to General Murdock. He should be here in several minutes - if not he, well hopefully he won't send General Petro to deal with something like this."

We waited in silence in the courtyard as Parva looked from body to body with morbid curiosity and I tried my very best not to do the same. The trio of mages that Parva had brought along finally finished searching the headquarters for evidence and carried out the trove of espionage. It was clear that Legault had hastily grabbed a few files from the Black Box, where we kept our most important information.

My father looked to me grimly and pointed at it, knowing the significance, but I wasn't worried. "I think that the files which are missing will be more telling than if he had just kept them where they were," I posited. Of course, Legault could have just grabbed a bunch of random files as some sort of false lead.

Unfortunately, Murdock had placed too much trust in his lieutenants to execute his orders. General Petro flew into the courtyard with a contingent of eleven wyvern riders, his spear drawn.

My father flew up to meet him.

"General," he said respectfully. Petro ignored him, as the man was retired and thus not worthy of any respect.

Petro turned to me. "Doug Deeping, you are under arrest by the justice of the King of Bern."

I stared at him, stunned. Parva looked just as perturbed. The worst part was that my father didn't even seem surprised. I knew he had hated General Petro, but I never knew the depth of contempt the other man held for him to order my arrest.

"No."

I was surprised the word hadn't come out of my own mouth. My father leapt onto the back of Blackie and drew his lance in a smooth motion.

"Trial by combat. I will be my son's champion."

Petro's mouth was set into a hard line. Was he willing to test his luck against the Highmaster of the Wyvern Corps, who had earned his position through blood, sweat and genius?

He was.

Petro nodded once and then leveled his lance at my father.

I compared the two weapons. Petro's lance was obviously well made, shining with a coating of silver that bit into flesh and caused deep wounds. My father had a collection of mass-produced iron lances he had bought from the local armory for a bundle deal of two thousand gold pieces.

But he had always said that it was the warrior who determined the strength of a weapon after all.

I had never seen my father fight before, but his dance of death in our manse's courtyard every morning spoke to how he had not let his skill decay, even as age weakened him.

And he was as fast as ever. Blackie surged forwards in a whirlwind of wyvern, easily cowing Petro's wyvern, which was twice Blackie's size and around a quarter as intimidating.

It came as a surprise to me when my father missed the first tilt entirely. Indeed, it came as a surprise to nearly everyone in the courtyard spectating. Blackie strafed to the left with a maneuver that seemed to defy the laws of nature and Petro's lance went wide by nearly three times the distance that my father had left his opponent. My father jabbed quickly at the spot where Petro had been a millisecond previously and Blackie winged back a comfortable distance, waiting for Petro's reaction.

I felt Parva's lips ghost over my ear and I shivered involuntary. "He did that on purpose. He's testing Petro's reaction and making him let his guard down."

Sure enough, Petro's wyvern flew at Blackie, hoping to overwhelm the smaller wyvern and allow his rider to score a kill on my father, but with a mighty heave, Blackie slammed his claws into the other wyvern's, matching its strength and headbutted the larger wyvern with what I estimated to be enough force to level a wall.

Petro careened out of the way, his dragon stumbling and attempting to orient itself, but with another jab, so much quicker than the last that I had barely registered it, with the butt of his lance, Highmaster Deeping knocked General Petro off his wyvern and Petro plummeted to the ground.

"Yield," my father called out with a voice of silken nobility and steel knighthood.

Petro somehow got to his feet, bowed and whispered, "I yield," just loud enough for us to hear.

"He's not going to take this sitting down," Parva whispered.


End file.
